Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

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NSA review panel to release findings on US surveillance practices – live

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Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:39 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:42 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

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Ik had begrepen in een van de berichten van jouw vorige linkjes dat ze wel iets gaan reformen, vooral de items die Snowden reeds bekend heeft gemaakt, maar dat het qua surveillance grotendeels blijft zoals het nu is.

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Op donderdag 19 december 2013 01:48 schreef Woods het volgende:
Zou het zelfs zo kunnen zijn dat ze kunnen sturen wie er aan de macht komt in een bepaald land(als je anti-vs ofzo bent dat ze je dan eventueel killen ofzo)?

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Barack Obama’s NSA fine-print problem

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An independent panel’s call for major changes to the nation’s surveillance programs ups the pressure on President Barack Obama to back serious reforms.
But the big changes the committee is calling for may be less vexing for Obama than one painful, half-buried conclusion: Vacuuming up all that data the National Security Agency collects in its call-tracking database, the panel says, hasn’t actually done much to protect the country from terrorism.

And so the panel’s report raises a pointed question: If collecting huge volumes of metadata on telephone calls from, to and within the United States doesn’t bring much benefit, just how much political capital is Obama willing to spend to keep the program going?

The review group’s finding that the much-debated metadata program hasn’t really accomplished much isn’t mentioned in the report’s executive summary or any of the 46 recommendations, but it appears, in an understated tone, about a third of the way into the 300-plus-page document released by the White House on Wednesday.

“Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders,” the report says.

In a footnote a few pages later, the panel members are even more blunt: The section 215 telephony meta-data program has made only a modest contribution to the nations security and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.

Under the current program, the NSA gets daily updates with information on calls made or received in the United States. That info is placed for five years in a database that authorities can search to try to establish with which numbers a terror suspect has been in contact. Authorities say they authorized fewer than 300 numbers last year for searches in that database.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwyRzybr

Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwx6TYUu

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Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts

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Matt Blaze has been pointing out that when you read the new White House intelligence task force report and its recommendations on how to reform the NSA and the wider intelligence community, that there may be hints to other excesses not yet revealed by the Snowden documents. Trevor Timm may have spotted a big one. In the recommendation concerning increasing security in online communications, the second sub-point sticks out like a sore thumb:

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Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

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Obama concedes NSA bulk collection of phone data may be unnecessary

• President: 'There may be a better way of skinning the cat'
• 'Potential abuse' of collected data cited as concern

President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy.

In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence.

“In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

Though insisting he will not make a final decision until January, this is the furthest the president has gone in backing calls to dismantle the programme to collect telephone data, a practice the NSA claims has legal foundation under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This week, a federal judge said the program “very likely” violates the US constitution.

“There are ways we can do this potentially that give people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, sufficient oversight and transparency,” Obama added. “Programmes like 215 could be redesigned in ways that give you the same information when you need it without creating these potentials for abuse. That’s exactly what we should be doing: to evaluate things in a very clear specific way and moving forward on changes. And that’s what I intend to do.”

He promised a meaningful response to a review panel that reported earlier this week, which urged more transparency in surveillance activities. “Just because we can do something it doesn’t mean we necessarily should,” he told reporters at the White House.

The president also went further than his review panel in suggesting the US needed to rein in its overseas surveillance activities. “We have got to provide more confidence to the international community. In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter any more,” he said. “The values that we have got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders, perhaps more systematically than we have done in the past.”

Obama pointedly declined to be drawn into a debate about possible amnesty for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose revelations about the NSA have sparked intense internal deliberation about changing US surveillance activities. The president distinguished between Snowden’s leaks and the debate those leaks prompted, which he said was “an important conversation we needed to have”, but left open the question of whether Snowden should still be prosecuted.

“The way in which these disclosures happened has been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities,” Obama said. “I think that there was a way for us to have this conversation without that damage. As important and as necessary as this debate has been, it’s important to keep in mind this has done unnecessary damage.”

Ben Wizner, Snowden's attorney, told the Guardian: “The president said that we could have had this important debate without Snowden, but no one seriously believes we would have. And now that a federal court and the president’s own review panel have agreed that the NSA’s activities are illegal and unwise, we should be thanking Snowden, not prosecuting him.”

The president would not comment on a suggestion last weekend by Richard Ledgett, the NSA official investigating the Snowden leaks, that an amnesty might be appropriate in exchange for the return of the data Snowden took from the agency.

Obama said he could not comment specifically because Snowden was “under indictment”, something not previously disclosed. While the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden on espionage-related charges in June, there has been no public subsequent indictment, although it is possible one exists under gag order.

The Justice Department referred comment on a Snowden indictment to the White House. Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, clarified that Obama was referring to the criminal complaint against Snowden. It remains unclear if there is an indictment under seal.

Conspicuously, Obama declined to rebut one assessment from his surveillance review group – that the bulk collection of US call data was not essential to stopping a terrorist attack.

Instead, he contended that there had been “no abuse” of the bulk phone data collection. But in 2009, a judge on the secret surveillance court prevented the NSA from searching through its databases of US phone information after discovering “daily violations” resulting from NSA searches of Americans’ phone records without reasonable suspicion of connections to terrorism.

That data was inaccessible to the NSA for almost all of 2009, before the Fisa court was convinced the NSA had sufficient safeguards in place for preventing similar violations.

In another indication of the shifting landscape on surveillance, the telecoms giant AT&T announced on Friday that it will begin publishing a semi-annual report about its complicity with government surveillance requests. AT&T followed its competitor Verizon, which announced a similar move on Thursday.

“We believe clear legal frameworks with accountability and oversight are required to strike the right balance between protecting individual privacy and civil liberties, and protecting the national and personal security, a balance we all desire. We take our responsibility to protect our customers' information and privacy very seriously and pledge to continue to do so to the fullest extent possible,” said AT&T vice-president Wayne Watts.

The first such report is expected for early 2014, Watts said. While technology firms like Yahoo and Google have pushed for greater transparency about providing their customer data to the government, the telecommunications firms – which have cooperated with the NSA since the agency’s 1952 inception – did not join them before the events of the past week.

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Op zondag 22 december 2013 18:33 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
http://m.volkskrant.nl/vk(...)avigationItemId=2664

Nederland wordt plotseling overspoeld met data centers

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Internet privacy as important as human rights, says UN's Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay compares uproar over mass surveillance to response that helped defeat apartheid during Today programme

The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.

Pillay has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.

The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously. "I don't grade human rights," she said. "I feel I have to look after and promote the rights of all persons. I'm not put off by the lifetime experience of violations I have seen."

She said apartheid ended in South Africa principally because the international community co-operated to denounce it, adding: "Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections."

The UN general assembly unanimously voted last week to adopt a resolution, introduced by Germany and Brazil, stating that "the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy". Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, were among those spied on, according to the documents leaked by Snowden.

The resolution called on the 193 UN member states "to review their procedures, practices and legislation regarding the surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data, with a view to upholding the right to privacy of all their obligations under international human rights law". It also directed Pillay to publish a report on the protection and promotion of privacy "in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance ... including on a mass scale". She told Berners-Lee it was "very important that governments now want to discuss the matters of mass surveillance and right to privacy in a serious way".

Berners-Lee has warned that online surveillance undermines confidence in the internet, and last week published an open letter, with more than 100 free speech groups and leading activists, to protest against the routine interception of data by governments around the world.

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Op zaterdag 21 december 2013 23:26 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:
Dat zijn positieve geluiden van Obama. Dus hij begrijpt dat het abuse of power gevaar het grootste issue is in dat hele NSA afluistergebeuren.

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The British firm laying the cable, Global Marine Systems, is plotting a new route that is shorter than any previously taken by a transatlantic cable. As closely as possible, it will follow "the great circle" flight path followed by London-to-New York flights.

"We spent 18 months planning the route," says Mike Saunders, Hibernia Atlantic's vice-president of business development. "If it ever gets beaten for speed we end up giving our customers their money back, basically, so my boss would kill me if we got it wrong."

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When it opens in 2013, Project Express will be the fastest cable across the Atlantic, reducing the time it takes data to travel round-trip between New York and London to 59.6 milliseconds from the current top speed of 64.8 milliseconds, according to Hibernia Atlantic. Those five milliseconds might not seem like a big deal, but to the handful of electronic trading firms that will have exclusive access to the cable, it will be a huge advantage. “That extra five milliseconds could be worth millions every time they hit the button,” says Joseph Hilt, senior vice president of financial services at Hibernia Atlantic.

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Hibernia Networks has halted all work on its flagship $300 million transatlantic cable, the Hibernian Express, after becoming embroiled in mounting tensions between the US and China over cyber security.

The company was forced to suspend all work on the project, the first attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic in more than a decade, after key US carriers gave warning that they would not be able to use the proposed network for fear of risking the loss of lucrative contracts with US federal government agencies.

The delay marks the first big casualty in the escalating row between the US and China over alleged links between Chinese equipment makers and the country’s secret services. The development also highlights the growing determination of US authorities to blacklist Chinese equipment makers from new infrastructure projects that could affect the integrity of US networks.

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However, in January and February of 2013, important news about
both projects began to emerge. Emerald Networks’ news was
positive, as it indicated that it had received what it described as
a “preliminary commitment” from the US government’s Export-
Import Bank in the form of a “Preliminary Project Letter.”
Hibernia Networks’ news, on the other hand, appeared dire. The
company was reported to have “halted work with Huawei” on the
Hibernia Express project due to security concerns expressed by the
US government toward Chinese suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE.
Hibernia Networks’ reported decision followed a 2012 investigation
by the US House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence which the chairman of the committee, Republican
Congressman Mike Rogers, summarized by saying that “If I were
an American company today...and you are looking at Huawei, I
would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual
property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care
about the national security of the United States of America.”
Critics asserted that the 60-page report released by the Intelligence
Committee contained no scientific or engineering evidence of
security weaknesses unique to ZTE and Huawei, nor did it identify
any attempts at espionage; instead, the report based its assertions
on what it claimed was the failure of ZTE and Huawei to “provide
clear answers to Committee questions...provide supporting
documentation...or alleviate Committee concerns.” Critics also
claimed that the committee’s actions, which benefitted American
suppliers, could easily be construed as trade protectionism. For its
part, the committee said that more detailed information could be
found in the classified annex to the report, but “that information
cannot be shared publicly without risking US national security.”

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TAT-14 transatlantic cable system upgrade goes to Mitsubishi Electric
May 18, 2011

Mitsubishi Electric Cor. (TOKYO:6503) says it has won a contract to upgrade the DWDM capacity of the transatlantic TAT-14 Cable Network to 40 Gbps per wavelength. The company expects to complete the two-phase upgrade, which will expand the fiber-optic network’s capacity 7X, by the fourth quarter of 2012.

TAT-14 comprises more than 15,000 km of fiber-optic cable and connects seven landing stations in the North Atlantic. It was commissioned in 2001 with a 10-Gbps DWDM system. The seven carriers in the consortium that owns the undersea fiber optic network include Abovenet Communications, Inc., AT&T Corp., Deutsche Telekom AG., France Télécom S.A., KPN B.V., TeliaSonera AB (publ)., and Verizon.
http://www.lightwaveonlin(...)ctric-122205469.html

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Tokyo, November 6, 2012 - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that it has completed work on the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) Cable Network to upgrade the submarine cable network with 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. The upgrade involved installation of submarine line terminal equipment in eight countries.
http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2012/1106.html

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GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second
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The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".

The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".

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Op maandag 11 november 2013 11:59 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:

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Als de Russische geheime dienst computers niet meer vertrouwt, kan je er gerust van uit gaan dat er een heleboel mis is met die dingen.
Russen zijn bijzonder slimme mensen, hooggeschoold en de geheime Russische dienst bestaat niet uit een stel naïeve lullo's.

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'NSA imiteert websites om malware te installeren'

De NSA blijkt in staat internetverkeer te injecteren met kwaadaardige software tijdens het surfen. Met mobiele kits zijn draadloze systemen tot op acht kilometer afstand aan te vallen. Ook blijkt de geheime dienst grote hoeveelheden hardware te infecteren.

Foto: AFP

Dat stelt beveiligingsonderzoeker Jacob Appelbaum maandag tijdens een presentatie op het 30C3-congres in Hamburg en in Der Spiegel.

Hij baseert zich op geheime documenten van de NSA, die afkomstig zijn van klokkenluider Edward Snowden.

De documenten beschrijven de systemen en apparatuur die de NSA inzet om internetverkeer in de gaten te houden en te beïnvloeden.

Infecteren

Via het een systeem met de naam Turmoil is het mogelijk om het internetverkeer van mensen te monitoren tijdens het surfen. Via het Turbine-systeem wordt een bezochte website vervolgens 'nagemaakt'. Via de nepversie van de site kan malware worden geserveerd of kan het gedrag van gebruikers worden bijgehouden.

Onder meer de site van Yahoo zou door de NSA worden gebruikt om gebruikers te treffen. "Om dit te kunnen doen moet je Yahoo kunnen nadoen. Dat is een belangrijk detail", stelt Appelbaum.

De NSA kan dit niet alleen op bekabelde netwerken, maar ook op draadloze netwerken. Daarvoor heeft de dienst mobiele sets, die netwerken tot op acht kilometer afstand kunnen aanvallen. "Wat je hier hebt is een systeem om sleepnetsurveillance uit te voeren", stelt Applebaum.

Anonimiteit opheffen

Via de in de documenten beschreven systemen FoxAcid en Quantum Copper is het mogelijk om internetverbindingen zo te resetten dat het feitelijk onmogelijk wordt om anonieme verbindingen op te zetten. Een ander systeem met de naam Quantum Insert maakt het mogelijk verbindingen te verstoren.

Uit de documenten blijkt dat de NSA verschillende netwerkkaarten kan gebruiken om gegevens te injecteren. Zo blijken chips van Dell – al dan niet abusievelijk – daarvoor geschikt te zijn. "Alles waarvan de Amerikaanse overheid zegt dat de Chinezen het doen, blijkt ze zelf ook te doen", stelt Appelbaum.

Mobiele telefoons

Om mobiele telefoons te vinden en af te luisteren gebruikt de NSA een zogenoemde Typhon Hx BSR .

Uit documenten blijkt ook dat er malware voor grote hoeveelheden hardware van computers en mobiele telefoons is ontwikkeld. Zo staat in de documenten expliciet dat alle iOS-apparaten kunnen worden geïnfecteerd met malware.

Daarnaast blijken ook harde schijven te infecteren. "Het maakt dus niet uit hoe vaak je een harde schijf opnieuw formatteert. De malware functioneert", stelt Appelbaum. Daarnaast wijst hij ook op de mogelijkheid om kwaadaardige software op SIM-kaarten te installeren.

Verder is het volgens Appelbaum mogelijk om beeldschermen op afstand af te lezen met straalverbindingen.

Sms

De malware op mobiele telefoons kan worden geactiveerd met een sms-bericht. "Als je alleen een sms nodig hebt, dan kunnen anderen dit ook ontdekken en misbruiken", vreest Appelbaum.

Hij vertelt dat hij bij een bezoek aan Julian Assange verschillende malen een Oegandees welkomstbericht op zijn telefoon kreeg. Volgens hem wijst dit erop dat surveillanceapparatuur eerder in dat land is ingezet, en vervolgens niet goed is geconfigureerd voor gebruik in Londen.

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Op maandag 30 december 2013 16:37 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Heeft de VS al acties ondernomen om het massaal bespioneren te verminderen?

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Op maandag 30 december 2013 17:11 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

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Daar hoor je niks over. Ik geloof niets dat er ook maar 1 server is uitgezet of wetten aangepast. En trouwens, worden er wat wetten aangepast, dan gaat alles achter gesloten deuren onverminderd verder. Als je het niet weet kun je er ook niets tegen beginnen.

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Op maandag 30 december 2013 17:15 schreef polderturk het volgende:

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Er moeten in ieder geval maatregelen genomen worden om het internetverkeer beter te beveiligen of versleutelen.